Meet Stans de Haas
The working group on Recognition and Rewards has a new project manager: Dr Stans de Haas. Coming from a background of social sciences and research policy Stans will take over from Marieke Adriaanse who was recently appointed full professor at Leiden University.
Who is Stans de Haas?
I’ve been working at the Research Support Office of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences for six years now. In my work at the RSO I support researchers in realizing societal impact with their research and I support the director of our Graduate School in developing a PhD policy. I am also secretary to the graduate Committee, the body of vice deans and directors of the Utrecht graduate schools that puts forward recommendations to the board of executives.
I studied at Utrecht University and briefly worked as a teaching assistant before starting as an external PhD candidate. I obtained my PhD at the University of Groningen and worked as a researcher at Rutgers for about 9 years. I was researching sexual harassment at work. I also investigated how often sexual violence occurs among all kinds of groups, such as people with a physical disability and in all kinds of settings, such as voluntary work. And I investigated the effectiveness of interventions to prevent sexual violence, for example among girls with a mild intellectual disability.
What experiences at Rutgers will benefit your new role?
At Rutgers I learned what it means to conduct research in practice. To find answers to questions from real people and how to involve them in the many stages of the research process. This was quite exciting at times. Because what if an intervention that someone has developed with a lot of passion turns out to be ineffective? Or what if the results are hard to acknowledge? That happened often in my research, because it was about such a sensitive subject.
I have learned to put scientific integrity first. It must be clear to the user of your research what your approach was and you must be able to explain your results. If I could have fallen back on an Open Science program during that time, it would have helped me, because I would have had more resources to make that openness happen.
What will you be doing at Open Science?
As project manager Recognition & Rewards my primary focus will be on implementing the recently published vision. I will work closely with Paul Boselie who is the driving force behind this track. Together we will work on the elaboration of the vision on Recognition & Rewards. We do this together with the Recognition & Rewards Fellows and together with UU employees, from PhD students to professors and support staff. I look forward to meeting UU staff, learn new things about Recognition and Rewards and in constant dialogue put the R&R-vision into practice.
Where do you hope Recognition & Rewards will stand in two years' time?
I hope that a Recognition & Rewards transition truly makes Open Science possible. That transition has already started, but at the moment researchers and their research are also individually assessed on the impact factors of journals. In future, it must be about teamwork, real quality, real use, real impact and openness. I would like to contribute to that.